Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment, as examples. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and/or semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
Dozens or hundreds of integrated circuits are typically manufactured on a single semiconductor wafer. The individual dies are singulated by sawing the integrated circuits along a scribe line. The individual dies are then packaged separately, in multi-chip modules, or in other types of packaging, for example.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allow more components to be integrated into a given area. These smaller electronic components also require smaller packages that utilize less area than packages of the past, in some applications.
Three dimensional integrated circuit (3DIC) structures and packages have been developed to increase integration density. 3DIC structures generally require processing steps that may not have been required in conventional structures. These additional processing steps may introduce problems that were previously unknown with conventional structures.